Interview Transcription
A transcription of interview questions and answers. What do you do for the company? “As Chief Operating Officer, I am responsible for all of the operations of HudBay Minerals Inc. Project development, technical services, exploration. All stages of the mine development cycle, from exploration, project development, to mine closure. Corporate responsibility also falls under me; environmental health and safety, as well as human resources. Its fairly broad, all of the operational aspects of the company.” What sort of on-the-job training have you done? “I'm a mineral engineer, chemistry was obviously a part of the curriculum. I'm a member of the Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum. I started my post-graduate employment in 1983 and did a formal graduate training scheme, so I was exposed to the operations of the company I was working with at the time, both technical and supervisory. I attended numerous courses over my career and continue to do so. I'm off to a conference next week for exactly that purpose. As COO, there is a requirement that I keep myself current with mining technologies and techniques. You never stop learning, I suppose is the key.” What is your educational history? “In some years, they courses were very specifically described as Mineral Chemistry, there was Chemical Processing and Technology. There were a number of chemistry related courses. It was a fairly typical engineering degree; you did all the maths, the stats, Mineral Physics, geology, Mining, and the Mineral Process Engineering side of things, similar to Chemical Engineering in some respects, and I graduated a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Mineral Engineering from the University of Leeds in the UK. They've changed the whole thing now, it would be a Bachelor of Engineering now. Might even be a Master of Engineering now, they changed it around in '88, I graduated in '83.” How much chemistry is used in your work? What kinds of chemistry? “If you look at my career, I've worked on what's called concentrators, where you take the ore from underground and crush it to liberate the minerals, and then use froth flotation. Froth flotation is all about surface chemistry. I've worked in a number of smelters, dealing with stuff at very high temperatures. Its important you keep the viscosity under control, to make sure it flows. I've run sulphuric acid plants, so I've been responsible for various waste and water treatment plants. I've run a zinc pressure leach operation, which is obviously all chemistry. Its fairly diverse, with some really interesting processes. You take, say, zinc and lead sulfide material, you would do a process called sintering. You create sulphur dioxide, which you then convert into sulphuric acid, and the zinc goes to zinc oxide, and you feed it to a blast furnace. There, the zinc oxide is reduced to zinc vapour and heated air. You scrub out the vapour with lead splash condensers, where you get 6000 tons an hour of molten lead flowing through a condenser with rotors that spray the lead, and it basically scrubs the zinc out of the gas. You then pump the lead into a cooling launder and as it cools, the solubility of zinc diminishes and the zinc separates out from the lead, and you tap the zinc off and the lead returns to the process. Incredibly interesting process. And then the zinc we actually further refine in zinc distillation columns, so in the same way you'd refine oil, we did it with molten zinc. The zinc pressure leach in Flin Flon is basically just a big chemistry set. You get the zinc concentrate and extract the zinc in quite a unique process. Under temperature and pressure, a very specific range. 150 degrees Celsius, 100 kilopascals. That leaves the zinc in zinc sulfate form, and it leaves the sulfur as elemental sulphur. And you can go on to create zinc metal using a process called electrowinning. So I mean, aspects of chemistry have been with me throughout my career. At this point, my job's a lot more managerial, but you still have to asses projects and engineering proposals, due diligence on other projects. And there's times when you'd still want to have a certain amount of technical understanding of what's going on, just to make sure you're doing the right thing for the company. So, its not a huge amount, but as I said, its important to keep up to date. And obviously, you always need it to a degree to asses the technical competency of those working for you as well.” How did you get to this point? “I started off in the platinum industry as a graduate metallurgist, its always going to be more technical based. But I moved to a number of operational management responsibilities, quite early in my career. Also did some shift supervision. I then moved to a zinc smelter, where I was more of a technical superintendent, more of a technical role, especially on the acid plant. There I commissioned a mercury removal tower, that's a process that scrubs the mercury out of gas. Heavily involved in lots of waste water treatment, removing cadmium, using ion exchange. But then again, I transitioned into more operational roles. I transitioned into smelting manager, in charge of the smelting operations. I was then headhunted to come over to Canada, to head up the zinc operations in Flin Flon. Same thing there, was eventually in charge of all metallurgical operations, as well as maintenance and utilities. I also took care of environment health and safety at that time. And obviously, on the environmental side especially, its quite important to have a good knowledge of chemistry, especially in the mining industry. Acid mine drainage is a big issue, and where the residual sulfide can impact the environment. I was also, with my responsibilities there, I headed up human health and risk assessment in Flin Flon, where we've just completed the final round of biological monitoring. And that was to address the concern of historical emissons from the smelting operations in Flin Flon. We had elevated levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, selenium, zinc, and copper, and we did an assessment to make sure there was no impact on human health, and we concluded there was a low risk. That was quite a key part of my career. Then I was on the business development side for a number of years, which would be more assessing opportunities for the company to take on, and again, you'd want to understand the process and how the ore bodies might respond, as well as the environmental issues and things there. And finally, I'm where I am currently as Chief Operating Officer.” Explain to me more about the acid plant. “Acid plants are very interesting. We made two concentrations, 96.5% and 98.5%, and acid is a commodity that's shipped all over the world. The issue with the mining industry is that you're dealing with sulphur, and sulphur's problematic. You have to separate the metal, usually in sulphide form, and you have to make pure metal, you have to remove the sulphur. You do it in the form of either acid or elemental sulphur like we do in Flin Flon. What's quite problematic is a lot of the waste rock you don't recover metals from have still got high sulphur content, and there you've got to control the acid, which is the acid mine drainage that everybody sees. Basically, I've spent a whole career battling sulphur, is what it comes down to. And that's the other aspect, that maybe we didn't touch upon. We covered a very inward looking view of what my job is, but through my career, you'd have to consult with governments, stake holders, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), multi-stakeholder consultations. And that's where its important that you do have a scientific base, because one thing that science is full of is very, very bad signs. Like, very few journalists are technically educated, so they basically publish a bunch of redacted. You deal with a lot of very ill-informed NGOs. Nobody wants to let the facts get in the way of a good story, so you spend a lot of time trying to explain what the correct information is. So there it certainly helps, when you're in these formal multi-stakeholder consultations.” Have you ever run into problems with governments? “Well yeah, I'd consider that the big part of my career in Flin Flon. The Canadian government put forward some new regulations that kick into place in 2013 that precipitated to the closure of the smelter in Flin Flon, and that was a very long process, and obviously we ended up shutting that smelter down. Some companies are spending $2.3 billion dollars on pollution abatement for their smelters. We were challenged to prepare pollution prevention plans, which was a good example of a technical background being important even in a senior management position. We assessed all sorts of different options for reducing sulphur admissions to the atmosphere, and finally concluded there weren't any that were economic and chose to shut down the smelter instead. But given that the smelter employed a significant number of people, its not a decision that you make lightly, for example.” There's a question here about average salary but I feel I'm overstepping some boundaries by asking it. “The problem with being a named executive officer of HudBay Minerals is that's all available online. So you can see exactly what it is your father and myself get paid. Its called the Management Information Circular, you can find it on SEDAR.com, which is where all publicly trading companies in Canada have to disclose what their named executives get paid. I would encourage you to quote those numbers, actually, because people tend to think the high paying jobs are lawyer and doctor and whatnot, but if you progress through your field in engineering, you can do quite well as well. That's to say, I want to try and encourage people to go into engineering.”